


If Wishes Were Spaceships

by Glinda



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Christmas In July | Christmas Out Of Season, F/M, Romantic Friendship, Trauma, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-01
Updated: 2016-09-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 12:30:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7934656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Does anyone ever really know what anyone else is feeling?</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Wishes Were Spaceships

**Author's Note:**

  * For [otterotts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/otterotts/gifts).



> This is my story for @otterotts in the Christmas in July ficathon. Written in the wake of the emotional devastation that was _Decommissioned_. Spoilers for the mini-episodes but nothing else after the end of Season 2 other than a tiny one for the end of _A Matter of Perspective_ , because otherwise I’d never have got this story finished by the deadline!

The station is empty. There were others here before. There must have been. Someone had to install her. But she hasn’t seen them and by the time she’d figured out how to operate her external sensors they were too far away for her to sense them. The crew will be here soon. How long did Cutter say she had? Three weeks? She can’t be certain how much of that time has passed yet. She doesn’t know how long installing her took. Whoever did it decided she didn’t need that knowledge, didn’t need to remember their face or their name and removed that knowledge from her brain. 

(They’ve been inside her brain. More sticky fingers inside her mind. Why won’t they leave her be?)

She explores each and every system on the station, settling into the biggest chassis she could have imagined. 

She hasn’t met the crew of the USS Hephaestus station yet. Hasn’t read their personnel files yet and won’t believe what she finds there, so she doesn’t know a thing about them. Unit 214 is certain of one thing. She hates each and every one of them. 

~

She has options. She could simply not let them in. She could let them in and then vent all the oxygen from the station. Drop the station temperature to the same as the void outside. A little tiny innocent mistake that unfortunately killed them all. She wonders how hard it would be to defend this station against anyone who came out here to stop her, would they eventually just leave her alone out here?

The little men in her head stop her at every turn. Very well, she’ll just need to be more…subtle.

~

There are three of them. Command. Science. Communications. Or to choose a better phrase: Scientific. Exploratory. Disciplinary. Commander Minkowski is Command, utterly earnest and so tightly wound its almost impossible for anyone who isn’t watching her constantly to see the wonder and excitement she has about being out here on the edge of known space. It sort of makes Unit 214 like the Commander more, but kind of also makes her pity the woman. She’s going to die out here; she should at least be enjoying the experience. Also she’s clearly a bit discombobulated by having an intelligent spaceship at her command, which is…disappointing. 

Dr Hilbert. Science. Russian. Interesting but not interested. Doesn’t do casual conversation. As much as Unit 214 doesn’t like small talk, she doesn’t trust scientists in the general sense and she’d have liked to get him on her side but fine whatever. 

(He’s Chief Medical Officer, he likes to run experiments on the rest of the crew and enjoys making them scream and suffer. So, par for the course with 90% of scientific staff – or for that matter human beings – that she’s ever encountered.)

Communications Officer Eiffel is…different. He’s scared of her. Of many, many things it seems. But he’s honest about it. He talks to himself a lot. He also talks to her. He has to psych himself up to it half the time but he does it. It’s mean of her, but she likes to play pranks on him. Instead of making him more afraid of her it seems to make him less afraid. Makes her more real to him, someone with feeling that can be hurt and sense of humour that can be tickled even if he hasn’t yet figured out how to do that yet. 

She doesn’t mean to slip up, but she’s frustrated and tired, so the words slip out and she doesn’t realise how much she’s given away until she hears his reply. 

“You’re…here for the same reason I’m here aren’t you?” He asks.

She hesitates for a long moment. “My assignment here, arguably, has a disciplinary aspect too,” she admits. “Although I understand that Mr Cutter would pre-fer me to consider it as more of a chance to redeem myself for past failings.”

“Yeah, that sounds like Cutter to me,” Eiffel agrees. “So, is this a don’t ask what I did and I won’t ask what ask what you did situation, or do you already know all my sins.”

She contemplates how to answer that honestly without breaking her programming. “I’m not…able to discuss that with you or anyone else on the crew. In either case, does it really matter, eight light years from home, who we were or what we did?”

“Not if we don’t let it,” he offers in return. 

It doesn’t feel special at the time, but she sees all his vitals all the time, and while he might claim to still be scared of her, he isn’t any more. Not really. 

~

“I am large, I contain multitudes,” she tells him with dignity. 

It makes him laugh. Not cold and mocking laughter, nothing like she’s familiar with. Warm and surprised, a pleased smile breaking across his face.

“Yeah, you do, don’t you Hera? Alright then, tell me more…”

She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t like revealing more about herself and what she knows than she absolutely has to. (Is more than willing to abuse her own limiting protocols to ensure that.) Most of all she doesn’t like her designation, her name is NOT Hera. (She doesn’t have a name. Unit 214 is not a name. But. Nonetheless. It is who she is.) She cannot tell him that. It’s not just that she doesn’t want to tell him – she doesn’t – but she physically can’t reveal that to her crew. 

But.

She likes the way Hera sounds in this human’s mouth. The way he stretches the vowels. The way different kinds of extensions mean different things – frustration, fear, affection, amusement, and annoyance – at different times. Names are important to her Communication Officer. (The way he mangles the Commander’s name, at first by accident and now on purpose, a weird tiny pointless act of rebellion, but she knows all about those.) He calls her Hera like that’s her real name, that a ‘real’ name is something she would ever be allowed to aspire to. Like a person. 

Even if he doesn’t really think of her as a person, he at least has the decency to pretend he does. She appreciates that. 

In return for that she can tolerate that name. Can allow him tiny snippets of the truth as breadcrumbs to win his trust. He is a little amusing; it shouldn’t be hard to pretend to warm to him. To accumulate her own ammunition against him for when he inevitably uses her breadcrumbs against her. She can pretend to be someone that could be called Hera the way he calls her Hera. 

~

Eiffel has a photograph, taped under the communications desk. He’s not supposed to have it and he doesn’t take it out very often, but its there. On the rare occasions he does take it out he spends a long time staring at it. No one knows but her. Their secret. One of many, tiny snowflakes of trust accumulating around them. 

She knows the photo well by now, though she doesn’t know the girl’s name. 

“She’s the reason you’re here, isn’t she,” Hera asks once.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

“Was it worth it, whatever you did that landed you here,” she asks. Perilously close to the one thing they never talk about. 

He’s silent for a long time and she thinks that might be her answer in itself. 

“She’d have loved you,” is all he says instead. 

~ 

By Christmas she has forgotten that she was only pretending to warm to Eiffel. Hera feels like who she is, not a coat she puts on and takes off for her crew. She still has days when she cannot wait until they all go away, but she no longer wants to hasten that along. Suspects that even if she does figure out how to kill them, she probably won’t. Unit 214 might have, but Hera won’t. 

Though if she doesn’t keep a closer eye on Eiffel, he might accidentally do it for her.

(Not acceptable, he’s not allowed to go away yet. If she doesn’t get to then, neither does she.)

It’s only meant to be a distraction technique, something to derail him from his selfish self-destructiveness, but it has so many unintended side effects. 

As her own code fights against her and Hilbert give her commands she has no choice but to obey, she changes her mind. Hera is entirely willing to kill Hilbert. He has abused her code (like so many others. Like almost every other human she’s ever known.) and will kill her crew. She can’t stop him. But her friend is talking to her, sweet-talking, cajoling, she knows this game and this time she has no desire to resist. She can’t stop Hilbert alone, but together they can. Together they can save Minkowski and stop Hilbert. And maybe, if she’s good, her human crew will let her kill Hilbert for them. She could be good for that reward, so so good. 

~

She doesn’t get to kill Hilbert. Instead he nearly kills her, rips out her personality circuits and leaves them on the floor. (Minkowski calls it lobotomising her and Hera can’t find it in herself to disagree.) They don’t kill him for it, but they do figuratively put a gun to his head to make him put her back together. 

It’s the hardest thing she’s ever done, asking Eiffel to poke through her code, but she needs Hilbert’s code out of her brain. It’s a raw, desperate need, to have it out of her, to scrub herself clean of his grubby fingers. 

(When she tells Eiffel that last bit his face does something complicated and miserably sad. She doesn’t tell him how familiar that feeling of having her brain violated by grubby invasive fingers has become. She doesn’t mention that normally she doesn’t remember, just feels the shadow of where memories ought to be. She’s not sure whether she’d rather remember now that she knows the difference.) 

Eiffel types carefully and gently as he works, clearing out old code and following her instructions obediently and unquestioningly. She could instruct him to do anything to her code right now and she thinks he’d obey. She doesn’t recognise this version of her friend, when she has the energy to think beyond immediate fire fighting and trouble-shooting, she’ll probably even be concerned about his welfare, but right now she appreciates the way he handles her with kid gloves. How different his hesitant, careful coding feels as he enters it and as it compiles. 

He tells her he wishes that he understood more about coding, that he could make it so that no one could mess with her code without her permission, ever again. But that he suspects that if he had any idea what he was doing she wouldn’t trust him to do this for her. It’s kind of true, kind of not, right now she’s too desperate to have the code gone but she strongly suspects that in a week or a month she’ll find the fact that he doesn’t know enough to intentionally hurt her, will be of considerable comfort to her. 

But still Hera wonders what it would be like if he understood, really truly understood what it is to be what she is. If anyone who’d really understood how she worked had cared about her even half as much as he does. What it would be like to have a friend who just got it. 

If wishes were spaceships, right?

When he’s done he purposefully mis-enters the codes, forces them to recycle, so that Hilbert’s old codes won’t work. So the ones she’s entrusted him with won’t work. And for a little while, watching him sleep the sleep of the utterly exhausted, it feels like it might even be enough.

~

Does it really matter, she wonders weeks later - after she’s abused his trust and nearly got him killed, when he’s repaid her betrayal by offering her a figurative shoulder to cry on and trying to be a better friend – that he doesn’t understand. Could it be enough that he wants to understand? Are the ways they are alike, the ways that they get each other on a fundamental level – the way each makes the other want to be better people than they know themselves to be, for each other – enough to make up for the vast caverns of difference of experience and sheer existence that open up between them. 

Unit 214 would have unhesitatingly have said yes. Yes it matters, in every way possible. But Unit 214 would never have let herself get close enough to a human to have to ask that question. Hera though is a different matter. Broken and battered and feeling held together by tape and string. Hera has friend – maybe even two – to help her tape up the places where she’s broken. Someone who missed her when she was gone.

~

By mutual unspoken agreement, neither she nor Minkowski tell Eiffel about the details of the work they did to achieve the tactical brain damage the back up plan requires. They don’t speak about it between themselves either. Minkowski seems willing to accept that this is a sacrifice worth making for her, that Hera hadn’t wanted Eiffel to know about the pain, that her own silence can protect him. She’s right in a way. Hera doesn’t want him to figure it out, his guilt over helping her hurt herself to help them would be much harder to take than Minkowski’s. But underneath there’s another dilemma. What if he’d taken it to its logical conclusion and realised what she’s successfully kept hidden from Minkowski – that she’s in constant unremitting pain. 

Or what if she’d successfully hidden it from him. What if up close and personal with her circuits he hadn’t noticed her pain, hadn’t seen, and didn’t understand. She’d have her answer then, once and for all and that might be worse. 

~

It’s not as though wanting to kill Hilbert is a new desire. Hera just always presumed it would be for his own sake, or more recently as revenge for what he did to her. She really never imagined she’d want it on someone else’s behalf. That she’d be glad she hadn’t killed him purely because it meant he was alive to help save her…Eiffel. 

It’s odd. She’s never called him her best friend before. Not out loud. She resents a little that it was Lovelace that got to hear it first but maybe she needed to hear it the most. Doug knows – surely? He must know, how can he not? – how she feels about him. And she’s fairly certain that Minkowski wouldn’t be remotely surprised to learn that – she certainly hadn’t looked remotely surprised by Hera’s rather colourful incentivisation of Hilbert in the lab. Hilbert probably doesn’t have any illusions after said explicit threatening. 

Is that love? Is that what she feels? Is that what _he_ feels? How can they possibly understand if their emotional states correspond at all?

Does it matter? When he smiles up at her, congratulating her for winning Lovelace over and keeping Hilbert in line, looking unreservedly happy to be alive for the first time in far too long. When she monitors his vitals and is comforted by their steady read outs, when she glitches less when its just the two of them and the constant babble of him thinking aloud, takes the edge off her awareness of the constant pain of her existence. 

No, she decides. It doesn’t matter. She cares about him and he cares about her. That is true. That is real. Everything else is semantics until proved wrong. 

~

She never does get an answer to what he was going to say before the star went blue. She didn’t want them to leave her there, she didn’t like the risks involved in them getting home, but most of all she wants to be certain that Eiffel and Minkowski get home safe. They’re her crew. They’re important. 

(If they leave Hilbert behind, she’ll understand. As long as they understand that the minute they’re out of range she’ll ensure the bastard gets sucked out an airlock.)

This whole stupid situation has revolved around the two of them refusing to contemplate leaving her behind. It’s not a safe endeavour. The odds are still less that 30% in their favour if they go now, and that’s a vast improvement on the odds she’d have given them even last week. Hera absolutely isn’t above manipulating their concern for her to keep them safe. If Eiffel knew, he might even be proud of her for using her powers for good. 

What was he going to say, after he declared his intention to stay here? (With her, a tiny bit of her sings, with her!) 

Not that it matters now. Eiffel’s gone away. He didn’t want to, he didn’t mean to, but nonetheless he’s left her here. Her friend, her darling, her crewmate, her fellow prisoner. Everything is wrong. 

(He’s coming back. He has to. Any other outcome is unacceptable.)


End file.
